Jam

After seeing so many mediocre movies in a row, this was definitely a breath of fresh air. To describe it I would say it's one of those off-beat films not driven by a plot but by characters. It reminded me a lot of The Breakfast Club in more ways than one.

As far as the actors, all of them were great and their characters were well defined and easy to relate to. In Fact, another movie to compare this to might be Glengary Glen Ross. It's not the story but the cast that make these films fun to watch. Jam had a great cast.

While I just compared Jam to two classics, I wouldn't necessarily rank it in that category, but I do think it certainly deserves better than it's current IMDb ranking of 5.3. I give it an 8.

Writer/Director Craig Serling takes a break from "Survivor" and "The Amazing Race" to bring us this interesting slice of life that won him an Independent Spirit Ward, and deservedly so.

While it may seem jumbles, and go back and forth, it cannot be helped given the nature of the story. After all, when you have a dozen or so people trapped on a highway waiting for help, you just have to go back and forth with their stories.

And, there were some really good stories. Lilac (Gina Torres) and Rose (Mariah O'Brien) are having a baby. It will not wait, and they commandeer an RV stolen by Curt (Christopher Amitrano) and Jerry (David DeLuise) to have the baby. This was the best part of the film, as the two criminals deal with two lesbians that will not be bullied.

There were several other interesting stories as three women are on the way to a wedding, a father, who is dying of cancer is trying to reunite with his son, a man is trying to get his wife to have a baby, and another father is off with his children trying to tell them he is moving. The interactions among this cast are touching and funny and thoughtful.

Well worth the time.

I saw this at the Boston Film Festival and it's quite a good movie.

It has lots going for it, especially two things:

A strong ensemble cast with favorites like Tess Harper and William Forsythe, made even stronger by the solid Amanda Detmer, who has charisma galore, and the sexy Jeffery Dean Morgan. Rrrrrrrrrrrr.

Secondly, it shows strong work by first-time feature director, Craig Serling. His directing is confident and efficient and watchable. His background in editing pays off here in his deft storytelling. Juggling so many story lines couldn't have been easy.

At turns funny and poignant, it was a crowd pleaser at the festival with good reason.

My title is a reference to Season 2, Episode 13 of the classic sitcom "Taxi" in which the mediocre aspiring actor Bobby Wheeler is describing his latest mediocre theater gig. Bobby says:

"Stall. It's an experimental play about 12 people stuck in a stalled elevator. It raises an age-old question: which is the greater agony-- to be stuck in an elevator or to be watching a show about being stuck in an elevator?"

While "Jam" isn't quite as apocalyptically awful as that, I couldn't help but associate with Bobby's underwhelmed audience while I was watching "Jam" an experimental film about 12 or so people stuck in a traffic jam.

The premise, believe it or not, was interesting, and for a low budget production it was remarkably glossy in its cinematography and editing. Then where did it fail? There were just too many characters that I hated. And I'm not talking about hating the obvious villains like the snobby socialite on the day of her plastic wedding (she was actually one of my favorite characters); I'm talking about hating the characters whom we're evidently supposed to like.

Therein lies the fatal flaw of this film. Its setup is so cartoonishly obvious, bad guy here, good guy there, that if we don't happen to agree with the allocated bad guys and good guys, the experience is annoying. I'll give you an example so you know what I'm talking about.

A lesbian couple is having a baby in the middle of the traffic jam. The script spends 5 seconds establishing that they are the "good guys" by showing a snobby rich housewife snub them in their time of need. So the lesbian couple proceed to an RV and demand entry because the pregnant one needs to lie down. The occupants of the RV have a good reason for denying entry (I won't spoil it), but the lesbians are enraged and commence kicking in the door of the RV, and even after they are allowed in they treat the RV owners like dirt (and of course the RV owners are back woods hillbillies so we too are supposed to assume they are dirt).

My point with this example is that the film draws HEAVILY on stereotypes, and I mean HEAVILY. Lesbians = good because they're persecuted by society. Hillbillies = bad because they are ignorant criminals. Rich people = bad because, well, they're rich. And so on.

30 minutes into the film I found myself so aggravated that I had to take a break and go watch Fox News so I could get more of a fair & unbiased picture. Ha.

Note to all filmmakers: stereotypes are funny within the context of thick satire. For example in "Edward Scissorhands", the syrupy thick satire of a candy colored surburbia was hilarious because the entire town became the antagonist to Edward, the deer-in-the- headlights protagonist. Or in possibly the greatest satire ever, "Catch-22", the U.S. Air Force was mercilessly skewered as a tangle of beauraucracy where generals acted more like Wall Street CEOs than military men. Very effective and funny. But the use of stereotypes fall flat when they are thrown in just because the filmmakers are too lazy to have proper character development. That seemed to be the case here.

I hated almost every character, especially the ones I was obviously supposed to like. For that reason, "Jam" never got out of first gear.

Such a simple idea perfected with a fantastic script and excellent cast. Marianne Jean-Bapiste, who was nominated for an Academy for her part in Secrets and Lies, was an amazing addition to this fine group of actors. Very fresh and fun. I was sad when it was over. There are 5 interwoven stories that all focus on fatherhood. A single father with his two young children trying to figure it out, a lesbian couple having a baby aided by some criminals in a stolen RV, a yuppie couple deciding if they want a baby, a woman getting married who is strongly weighing the father potential of her husband-to-be and a conflicted father/ teen-age son relationship that must get worse before it gets better. Dan Byrd, who plays the teenager gave the best performance in the film, in my view! I am very much looking forward to more work by this writing team, Craig Serling and Nicole Lonner, and first time director, Craig Serling.